A field guide to the people, places, technology, and history of 2035 Los Angeles. Everything you need to read Null Witness without a decoder ring. Spoiler-safe: nothing below gives away where the story goes.

Characters

• Cade Voss A twenty-four-year-old fourth-year student in Los Angeles who survives on bug-bounty payouts and gray-market contract work. Withdrawn,...
• Cass Calloway A twenty-three-year-old biomedical research student from Wellesley, Massachusetts, who lives one floor below Cade. Charismatic, funny, and...
• Ki Sou Mihn Cade's closest friend, a second-generation Vietnamese-American hardware technician in his late twenties who runs an electronics shop in...
• Samantha Reyes Goes by Sam. A second-year biomedical student from San Diego on a full academic scholarship, and Cass's closest friend. Warm, kinetic, and...
• Mr. Slash A trusted online contact and work broker Cade has known for three years and met exactly never, communicating only through an encrypted...

Places

• WAIT The West Abbey Institute of Technology, a fully accredited university built into repurposed office space in the heart of Los Angeles. It...
• The Pacific Compact The coordinated western zone (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and parts of the Southwest) that emerged as the most economically...
• The Interior The patchwork of the former United States between the coasts (the Deep South, Great Plains, and Rust Belt) where formal governance gave way...
• M.I.H.N Custom Systems Ki Sou Mihn's small electronics business on 4th Street in Santa Monica: screen repairs, component sourcing, and custom builds. The...
• The Singularity An underground hacker space below street level on Cahuenga in Hollywood, built around the principle that information goes in and none comes...
• Event Horizon A legitimate street-level bar on Cahuenga with a noise permit, liquor license, and taxes paid, and the public front for the hidden workspace...
• The Black Hole A bar in West LA whose ground floor serves the tech and geek crowd. Its basement, a former wine cellar, functions as a covert gathering...

Organizations

• The Federal Continuity Government The reduced federal remnant based in Washington, DC, that still claims authority over the entire former United States. By 2035 it has...
• Sigil Systems Incorporated A top-tier cybersecurity firm specializing in network infrastructure design and security architecture, holding active contracts with both...
• The Underground Nexus An invite-only dark net forum, reputedly not a forum in the ordinary sense, where exploits, footholds, and access to compromised systems are...

Technology

• The Glass The pervasive public surveillance network of 2035 Los Angeles, officially the Public Safety Network, sold to citizens as a civic good under...
• NovaCoin Abbreviated NoC, the Pacific Compact's official digital currency, introduced in 2030. It is purposefully traceable by design (every transfer...
• Palm-PC The handheld device carried by Pacific Compact agents, understood by everyone to be exactly what it is: a visible instrument of the...

Concepts

• bug bounty Formal programs that pay independent researchers to find and responsibly disclose software vulnerabilities. Bug-bounty work is Cade's...
• Capture the Flag Abbreviated CTF, a competitive hacking format built around solving security challenges and capturing hidden tokens. Legitimate versions are...
• Anomaly A Glass classification tag applied to a person whose pattern of life doesn't fit the expected shape: irregular hours, unpredictable...

Events

• Dark Cypher An underground capture-the-flag competition running through layers of the dark net in structured tiers, offering an unusually large NovaCoin...
• The Fracture The gradual-then-sudden breakup of the United States around 2031, in which the western states, Texas, and other regions ceased to function...
• The Bust The collapse of the AI investment bubble across 2027, when institutional capital fled the sector overnight and valuations sustained by...
• The Deletion Event The catastrophic late-2027 cascade in which failing automated maintenance systems executed mass deletions across the cloud infrastructure...
• The Fall The 2028 collapse of the US dollar, when frozen credit markets and Deletion-Event damage to financial records drove the currency to lose...